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Summer 2012 : Fight
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Fight
Oregon Humanities: Summer 2012
River Rescue
Oregon university students honored for helping keep artifacts safe and dry.
In mid-January, high water levels on the Willamette River created emergency conditions and talk of a hundred-year flood. As water closed roads and entered homes, the area’s history was threatened, too. At the Willamette Heritage Center in Salem, collections manager Kylie Pine worried about three historic houses, dating from 1841, that housed artifacts like pioneer Jason Lee’s writing desk. Upstream at the Heritage Museum in Independence, director Peggy Smith watched the basement archives, with papers from town patriarchs, take on water.
Smith and Pine reached out for help to Western Oregon University and Willamette University. “By the time I hung up the phone,” Smith says, “four students came through the door.” More students kept coming, including football players and members of the service club Wolves Helping Others. Club founder Chelsea Beecroft and her fellow WOU students helped move the museum archives out of the flooding basement. Meanwhile, Willamette senior Brin Manoogian-O’Dell, a former heritage center intern, and others saved items from the Lee House.
For their efforts, twenty-six students received Heritage Stewardship Recognition certificates from the Heritage Program of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. The award recognizes Oregonians who help protect the state’s history. “It was fantastic,” Smith says. “Now they’re first on my list of people to call!”
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- Kathleen Holt
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- Jen Wick
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- Ben Waterhouse
- Communications Coordinator
- Allison Dubinsky
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- Tom Booth
- Brian Doyle
- Debra Gwartney
- Julia Heydon
- Guy Maynard
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- Greg Netzer
- Camela Raymond
- Kate Sage
- Rich Wandschneider
- Dave Weich
Oregon Humanities magazine examines topics of broad public interest from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Recent issues of this publication have focused on stuff, nostalgia, and civility. Through good and thoughtful writing, Oregon Humanities magazine enriches our understanding of important subjects and stimulates conversation and reflection among readers, their friends, families, colleagues, and neighbors.
Contributors
Camas Davis
For more than a decade Camas Davis has been a magazine editor and writer for national magazines such as National Geographic Adventure and Saveur, and local publications such as Portland Monthly, Edible Portland, and Mix. In 2009, she traveled to France to study butchery. Upon her return, she founded the Portland Meat Collective, a traveling butchery school.
Eric Gold
Eric Gold is a freelance writer in Portland.
J. David Santen Jr.
J. David Santen Jr. has written about books, business, the environment, and communities for the Oregonian, the Portland Business Journal, and other publications. He lives in Portland.
Jill Owens
Jill Owens works in marketing for Powell’s Books, where interviewing authors is the most interesting part of her job. She’s originally from the South but has lived in Oregon for eleven years and is here to stay.
Jim Lommasson
Photographer Jim Lommasson received the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice & the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms. Previous publications include Oaks Park Pentimento. His photographs have been widely exhibited in museums and galleries.
John Frohnmayer
John Frohnmayer is chair of the Oregon Humanities board of directors.
Margot Minardi
Margot Minardi is an assistant professor of history and humanities at Reed College, and the author of Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (2010). She is currently working on a history of the nineteenth-century American peace movement.
Sarah Gilbert
Sarah Gilbert is a writer, photographer, struggling urban farmer, mama to three boys, and military wife in southeast Portland. She is editor-in-chief of the new literary magazine for parents, Stealing Time, and is working on two memoirs and at least one novel.
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